The present invention relates to the baseband processor of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receiver, and more particularly, to an OFDM baseband processor for the wireless LAN (WLAN) IEEE 802.11a or IEEE 802.11g standards.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technique for wireless LAN standards such as IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g. In the IEEE 802.11a standard, the carrier frequency is 5 GHz. There are 64 implied subcarrier frequencies with a spacing of 312.5 kHz (=20 MHz/64, wherein 20 MHz is the channel bandwidth). Among the 64 implied subcarriers, there are 52 nonzero subcarriers, which includes 48 data subcarriers carrying data and four pilot subcarriers used as pilot tones. Each subcarrier hums away at 312.5 k symbols/second. Data is blocked into 3.2-microsecond frames with an additional 0.8 microsecond of cyclic prefix tacked on for mitigation of intersymbol interference, and the data frame and the cyclic prefix thereof forms a data symbol lasting for 4 μs. A 64-point fast Fourier transform is performed over 3.2 microseconds to extract the 48 data symbols on the 48 QAM signals. For binary phase-shift keying (BPSK), with 1 bit per symbol, that is 48 bits in 4 microseconds, for an aggregate data rate of 12 Mbits/s. Half-rate convolutional coding brings the net rate down to 6 Mbits/s. For 64 QAM, the aggregate data rate is six times higher, or 72 Mbits/s.
FIG. 1 illustrates the main function blocks of the transmitter end 100 of the OFDM baseband processor according to the IEEE 802.11a standard. The main function blocks of the transmitter end include a signal mapper 102, a serial to parallel converter 104, an inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) block 106, a parallel to serial converter 108, a cyclic prefix (CP) adding block 110, a digital to analog converter (DAC) 112, and a radio frequency (RF) transmitter 114. OFDM is a multi-carrier modulation technique. First, the data stream is modulated with signal mapper 102 using modulation techniques such as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) or Binary Phase Shift keying (BPSK). The next step in OFDM modulation is to convert the serial data into parallel data streams with the serial to parallel converter 104. The Inverse Fast Fourier transform (IFFT) is performed on the modulated data with the IFFT block 106. The IFFT is at the heart of the OFDM modulation, as it provides a simple way to modulate data streams onto orthogonal subcarriers. The data streams before and after IFFT are designated as X[n] and x[n] to represent frequency domain data and time domain data respectively, wherein n represents the order number of the subcarriers. After the IFFT, the parallel data streams are concatenated into a single data stream by the parallel to serial converter 108. Finally a characteristic cyclic prefix (CP) is added to each OFDM symbol being transmitted in the single data stream with the cyclic prefix adding block 110. The OFDM symbol is now ready, and after conversion from digital to analog form by the DAC 112 and modulation by the RF transmitter with a carrier frequency fc, the symbol is sent over channel 150 as RF signals to the receiver end.
FIG. 2 illustrates the main function blocks of the receiver end 200 of the OFDM baseband processor according to the IEEE 802.11a standard. The main function blocks of the receiver end 200 include a RF receiver 202, a sampler 204, a synchronization block 206, a cyclic prefix remover 208, a serial to parallel converter 210, a fast Fourier transform (FFT) block 212, a channel estimation and equalization block 214, a parallel to serial converter 216, and a signal demapper 218. The receiver end 200 performs the inverse of the transmitter end 100. After transmitting through channel 150, the signal is received by the RF receiver 202 with carrier frequency fc′. The received signal is then passed to the sampler 204 and sampled. Then, the data samples are compensated for carrier frequency offset (CFO) with the CFO correction block 226 inside the synchronization block 206 wherein the CFO is caused by the difference between the carrier frequency of transmitter end 100 and receiver end 200 (fc and fc′). The other function blocks inside the synchronization block 206 are frame detection block 220 and timing synchronization block 224. Frame detection detects the symbol frame of the data samples, and timing synchronization detects the symbol boundary of the data samples inside a data frame. The receiver end 200 must determine the symbol boundary to ensure that only the signal part of every OFDM symbol is written into the FFT and no part of the cyclic prefix. Implementing timing synchronization can also avoid Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) caused by sampling timing errors. After the cyclic prefix of symbols are removed with the CP removal block 208, the data samples are converted form serial to parallel, and applied to the FFT block 212. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) converts the time domain samples back into a frequency domain. Because the signal through channel 150 has suffered from frequency selective attenuation, the data samples are passed to the channel estimation and equalization block 214 to equalize the attenuation. The parallel to serial converter block 216 converts the parallel data samples into a serial data stream. Finally, the data stream is demodulated with QAM or BPSK schemes by signal demapper 218 to recover the original input data.
FIG. 3 shows the OFDM burst mode frame structure 300 which actually has four distinct regions. The first is the short preamble 302. This is followed by a long preamble 304 and, finally, by the signal symbol 306 and data symbols 308. Guard intervals 312, 314, 316 and 318 are inserted between each burst section. The short preamble 302 consists of 10 identical short OFDM training symbols 322, and each short training symbol 322 lasts for 0.8 μs and contains 16 data samples. The long preamble 304 consists of two identical long training symbols (LTS) 324 and 326, and each long training symbol lasts for 3.2 μs and contains 64 data samples. Between the short and long OFDM symbols, there is a guard interval (GI2) 312 of length 1.6 μs (32 data samples) that constitutes the cyclic prefix of the long symbols. Short training symbol 302 is used for frame detection, coarse timing synchronization, and carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation. Long training symbols 324 and 326 are used for fine timing synchronization and channel estimation. Signal symbol 328 contains information about data rate, data length, and modulation scheme. Data symbols 330 and 332 contain the payload data and are of variable length.
There are many sources of frequency offset in wireless systems. The main sources are the difference between local oscillators at the transmitter and the receiver and the Doppler shift. The frequency offset destroys the orthogonality between the OFDM symbol subcarriers and introduces inter-channel interference (ICI) at the output of the OFDM demodulator. Therefore the CFO correction block 226 shown in FIG. 2 is required to compensate the samples for CFO. FIG. 4 shows a delay correlation circuit 400 for implementing frequency offset estimation in time domain with short preamble 302 or long preamble 304, and the delay correlation circuit 400 can be used for realizing the CFO correction block 226 shown in FIG. 2. The samples are delivered to a delay line 402 which delays the samples for N sampling periods, and the number N is determined with the number of samples of the short training symbol 322 (N=16) or the long training symbol 324 or 326 (N=64). The conjugate of the delayed sample from a conjugate block 404 is then multiplied by the current sample with a complex multiplier 406 to generate a product value. The adder 410 and the delay block 412 then accumulate the product value, and a delayed product value from another delay line 408 is subtracted from the accumulated value from delay block 412. The remainder is then delivered to a phase calculator 416 for retrieving its phase angle, and the phase angle is then averaged to generate the estimated frequency offset.
However, there is still some remnant CFO uncompensated in the traditional method. Because the OFDM system is far more vulnerable to the carrier frequency offset than single-carrier systems, even the remnant CFO of a small fraction of the subcarrier spacing can cause serious performance degradation if not properly compensated. Hence, there is a need for estimating the frequency offset of signals in frequency domain (after FFT) to reduce the error of the prior frequency offset estimation in time domain.